Monday, March 14, 2005

Partial and Interval accounting records

Traditional accounting generates a record only when the process terminates. The current process data from ps contains different information so its not possible to keep the two in sync. Extended accounting includes the wracct command that forces an accounting record to be generated for a process or task. The partial record is tagged differently as shown below, but contains the same information.

106 group-proc-partial [group of 35 object(s)] 1000 pid 664...

For a process, partial records provide the total resource usage since process creation. For a task, an additional option allows for resource usage over the interval since the previous record was written.